Vice Sports: The Forgotten Story of the First Black Female Wrestlers

An excellent, necessary, article:

Women’s wrestling was still riding high in the early 1950s and women across the country saw Burke, and no doubt her income, and wanted to follow suit—including a trio of sisters living in Columbus, Ohio. Babs Wingo was the first of the three to start training as a professional wrestler, followed by Ethel Johnson. Johnson reveals in the upcoming documentary Lady Wrestler, directed by Chris Bournea, that the two would take judo and gymnastics classes at the Columbus YMCA on top of their pro wrestling training and strength training.

Women’s wrestling, especially black women’s wrestling, is one of the least-covered topics in the genre. We can fix that. More of this please.

Rassler Release 8 AKA Random Events Part II

Just pushed a new release of my free retro pro wrestling RPG, Rassler. This one contains some small updates and an interesting, complicated, unintended consequence:

The last bullet point, explaining the changes to the activity system, is essentially a naive implementation of drug dependency. The player needs their health to be above 0 in order to work or go out. If the player has $40 they can buy some pain killers to get them through the next match, but pain killers only provide a +6 to short-term health (and a -6 to max health, affecting their future prospects and longevity) so it is not a sustainable solution. Either the player gets lucky, and their next several matches are relatively easy and they aren’t further injured, or something bad happens and they’re rendered immobile and bankrupt in the end.

More in the Devlog.

Rassler

Rassler is a little 2D 1980s-inspired pro wrestling RPG that I’ve been developing in my spare time, using the Love2d engine. It’s free, I’ve been doing updates pretty regularly, and plan on continuing to do so. Currently only built for OS X, but Windows builds are coming soon.